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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29267772">Unkown system</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoodpearlwood/pseuds/hoodpearlwood'>hoodpearlwood</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Force Sensitivity (Star Wars), Gen, Mando is on his own again, Mention of Death, Near Death Experiences, POV Third Person, Post-Season 2, Science in space, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Space Exploration, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Strangers to Lovers, Touch-Starved</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:54:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,922</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29267772</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoodpearlwood/pseuds/hoodpearlwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A Mandalorian roamig the outer rim, alone again. A scientist searching the unknown, hidding from herself, too curious for her own good. And curiosity killed the cat<br/>...but satisfaction brought it back.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Din Djarin/Original Character(s), Din Djarin/Original Female Character(s), Din Djarin/Reader, The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV) &amp; Original Character(s), The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/ Original Female Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. unknown system</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A scientist too curious for her own good and an expedition gone wrong.</p>
<p>Please note that this is my first star wars fiction, alas my first attempt at writing something in a long time. And star wars being star wars i tried to get the details right, but I am only human and know so little of this vast univers. <br/>This idea settled itself into my head after I started watching season one and it grew unbeknownst to me, until it burst up again after season two aired. <br/>I am quiet excited to share this with y'all and I hope this little story helps you get out of your mind for a moment or two as it did for me. <br/>mad love,<br/>pearl xx</p>
<p>ps: in case you noticed: english is not my first language and i don't have a beta, so please do excuse any mistakes. I really try to find them before you do :)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She opens her eyes and notices the stillness off the air around her.</p><p>Instead of rays of light flickering undistinguishable around her, they have set. Stars are reduced to little specks of golden rays, but all of them are forgotten in shadow of the planet that fills nearly all of her windshield.<br/>
Its surface is partly clouded, storms brewing and twisting high into the atmosphere in gashes of oranges and blues. Landmass in coloring indistinguishable from the gases off the clouds; continuing in various shades of petrol, azures, fire orange and mustard yellow. The colours mixing in her cockpit, the only light in the otherwise dark spacecraft.<br/>
Eslo scrubs over her tired face, once, a slight motion, sits up straight and switches on manual navigation control board. No comets, no moving object around her, so she sets a swift course to the unnamed planets surface. And while she feels the planets gravity pull her, and the storm clouds rocking her in her spacecraft she can feel herself hum in anticipation. Excitement letting her jingle up nonsensical tunes. New shores to discover, new sights to be unfolded. </p><p>Too occupied with finally feeling grit under her boots, she is too busy to check the atmosphere for an in depth analyses. Instead she opts for her clear-glass helmet and the Phrik alloid filters strapped to her back, secured over her equipment. The weight on her shoulders settles her nerves, and Eslo files her lungs with the slightly stale oxygen mix as she walks down the ramp of her ship.<br/>
The air on the ground is foggy, tinted with lilac by the rising suns in the horizon. Her compass jitters, correcting itself along the new magnitudes of the magnetic field, and Eslo checks the recorder on her belt, sees the red needle reassuringly jitters across the screen, collecting data while she speeds up, climbs over blue rocks covered with orange moss. Her gloved fingers tenderly stroke the first living organism she encounters on this planet, but she wants to bring some distance between herself and her ship before collecting any samples, afraid of her arrival causing any cross-termination. </p><p>She walks until the two suns are near their zenith.<br/>
The fog has lifted to a landscape of rocks, mosses and little ponds of milky liquid. Even, apart from the giant trees piercing through the land like lonesome mountains. She rests in the shadow of the nearest specimen, its diameter as large as an X-wing; bark rilled with petrol valleys and tops, a typography of growth. The organic mass of the tree, here at its base, near undistinguishable from the coloring of the rock it grows from. Only lightening the higher away from the ground it gets. From down here she can’t spot its crown.<br/>
Nearly two thirds of her vials are now filled, waiting to be examine on the laboratory of her ship. Medicine and evolved bacta, agriculture crop or indicator of the ever evolving evolution of the lifeforms of the force; she searches for nothing in particular but studies everything. Can’t rest until plant are catalogued and the unbeknown discovered.<br/>
Checking the electromagnetic hooks on her hands and the rope around her waist, rising high along the trunk, she sets off. The tree is soft like water soaked moss, nevertheless firm under her gloved touch, the density not giving way to the slight mass of her body. </p><p>It takes half an hour to reach the first branch, yet the feeble organic mass is barely any thicker than her leg and sways in the upturning wind from the surface as soon as she touches it. Eslo stills, her muscles aching from her arms to her feet, from clinging to this undefined organism of a tree, and the temptation to rope herself down is great. But as she roles her head, as she feels the soreness in her neck from looking up, she can already see the branch on which her rope is curled around, thick in diameter, still in the warm winds. The Azur coloured leaves gently waving down.<br/>
Black blossoms that have opened up in the heat of the day are nestled along it all. Temptation turns into the potential of all the samples she could collect. The unformed questions that could be answered. Why giant flora could possibly flourish on an otherwise near hostile environment that this unknown landmass seems to provide. And as Eslo set foot on the enormous swelling that evolves into a knotted branches, she can only marvel (again and again) at the way life finds a way to grow. </p><p>The view is fantastic, in the literal meaning of the word. The lilac hue of the clouds gathering in the distant, the darkest corners steel gray. The varying shades of blue and green that indicate the different layers of landmass , mashed together on the open rocky surface. And the bright yellow moss, here just specks but the whole horizon is covered with it, only broken up by the milky ponds, each of them as indecisive about their size as well. </p><p>Eslo sits down, crosses her tired legs and straightens her spine. The wind is warm on her bare skin as she takes off her gloves. She closes her eyes and tries to see everything around her.<br/>
Sometimes she think she is only deluding herself.<br/>
The placebo of wishful childish thinking taking over into her adult life, when the darkness of closed lids is disturbed by motion, by golden hues and something flowing all around her.<br/>
There is no family she could ask, no mother and no father to gently have taught her about the force and its way in the world and its beings. Maybe she clung to the tale of everything being connected by that one thing because she herself felt so utterly alone; in the orphanage and in the universe. And so it had carried on, this little trait of character.<br/>
Here, high in the air, she takes a deep breath, simply following the things she think she sees behind closed lids.</p><p>Nudging forward inch by inch, Eslo tries to reach the nearest blossom. Despite the vastness of the tree itself, the bud is barely the size of a fist. The wind is rushing around her now, grasping and yanking at every loose fragment of her it can catch, and with it the outreached branch is swaying. She can only hope that the rope is tight and she quickens her effort to cut of this flower, the tiny vibroblade slizing deliberately through the organic layers, careful not to damage anything else, when finally, finally, it is in her hands and safely secured in a container attached to her belt. But as soon as she is crwaling back to the base of the branch, she notices something is wrong. </p><p>The wind is not dying down, instead it's gaining in momentum and a mass of clouds is now over her.  The weight of the entire sky seeming to crush down on her. Yet the tree itself is transforming: its rocky and carved bark is swelling up, growing rounder and smother with every passing second. And to Eslo's horror the former underlying denseness is vanishing; every cell becoming limb.<br/>
What an interesting defense mechanism. The only clear thought that pops into her mind, while she feels the world around her tipping. Her gloves slip off the bark, and one moment she is standing and in the next she feels her balance tilting as well and before her mind can race to any solution she jumps, clinging to her rope, falling.<br/>
Eslo screams. Her own voice ringing through the modulator, echoing inside the helmet. For a split second she is just tumbling through air, and then length of the robe catches up, and with a yake that bangs through every cell of her body, she is stoped. But the momentum is still moving through her, crashing her into the trunk, hitting her helmet at an angle that leaves her barely conscious.<br/>
And so the realization that her rope, her last line of safety, is slowly tearing apart, meets her without any alarm. She tries to bring herself to lift her arms, to hold on, but the thought just slips away. So when it snaps, and she is falling for the second time, her gaze is turned skywards, only wondering what will await her after death.<br/>
There is time enough for Eslo to close her eyes.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. unknown passenger</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Enter: a Mandalorian<br/>A slight trigger warning: mention of death/ fatal wounds.<br/>xxx pearl</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There is no plausible description of waking up, because there is no transition from one state to another. </p>
<p>Her consciousness rises like a cold reboot: there is nothing and then her eyes are forced open, dissingly taking in an overload of information. Eslos gaze darts around, she is trying to see, anything, and to stop this horrendous thing, that is tearing her flesh apart. Pain that tears through her body, so loud in its feeling, that she can’t think. Her lungs ache, air not filling them and she just doesn’t know what is happening but every cell tells her to run, to move away and flee. <br/>So her arms wave around and her legs jerk, stamp, only nothing is happening. A scream, fitting this indescribable agony, should leave her body, yet what passes over her lips is barely a rough moan. </p>
<p>Someone Is there to hear her. A broad hand is waved in front of her face, and with a postponement between picture and sound wave her mind slowly puzzle noise from heart race to words together. <br/>„Can you hear me?“<br/>Fluid films, becomes shifting motion becomes slowly a picture in her head. A gloved hand waving in front of her eye line. She is still wearing her helmet. It’s entire glass sprung and chipped, but not actually busted. With her awakening her breath quickens and what little she could make out now is beginning to vanish with her ragged breath that is fogging up. </p>
<p>She wants to say something, she wants to scream off pain and confusion, but Eslo can barely open her mouth, the skin of her lips sticking together.  And just like that unbearable panic rises in her chest, every nerve in her body screaming to run and to move. Her arms prob herself up, the legs scruffeling over the ground, but a sound escapes her of brutalistic pain, the hot white iron piercing her, leaving her limbless. Defenseless.</p>
<p>„Calm down.“ Through it all she feels how to hands slightly press her down, loos in their grip, ready to pin her down.<br/>„I am going to remove your helmet; don’t move. Please“ the baritone voice is the only thing Eslo can concentrate on, and so she listens to the modulated words, while he slowly tires to slide the helmet up. But something is jammed, and tears escape her wide opened eyes, because something feels just wrong set off with this motion. <br/>The hands are placed on her shoulders again, this time without force (reassuringly her pain doped mind whispers).<br/>„This is not going to work… I’ll have to cut you out.“ He shuffles around her, and in the next moment presses a blade against the chin part, glass swinging from the vibroblade.<br/>„Close your eyes.“ Eslo can do nothing else than to trust those hands and follow command.</p>
<p>Air, stale from close encounters, enhanced with the smells of a well cared for ship, fill her lungs as he maneuvers the cut pieces away. His gestures deliberate and slow.  And as Elsos eyes follow his movements, only her contorted features are mirrored back, the metal helmet of her counter presenting nothing else. A stillness comes over him, a moment of shared disbelieve of the situation, and he stands up, bringing distance between them. Even though her body seems on fire and numb with pain, this much she can feel. </p>
<p>A secret about Eslo: guessing the underlaying emotion behind words and face worn in mask has always been easy for her. Only with age and only with growth in the nuances of feelings, the hint that it was more than simple guessing, occurred to her. Like anything in nature it is unpredictable and she cannot say what makes her pick it up and be completely numb to it in the next moment. She had no one to ask, no one to turn to, so the discovery stayed a secret until the secret was layered with dust and she had made it her life’s work to reach beyond the borders of known galaxies. A task that was doomed from the beginning to be a lone mans game.</p>
<p>He comes back, an old towel and a basin of water in his hand. And again the black glass of his visor stares at her, without any movement. <br/>Eslo wants to sit up, feel her body work around her commands again, but even a tremble of her fingers leaves her in gasps. At once his hands are there again, the only expression of care she can understand right now. Holding her shaking body. <br/>He starts to clean her face. The fabric rough against her skin, the cold water a balm on her wired nerves.<br/>„Not the talkative type, I assume?“ Her voice is barely a whisper. <br/>He huffs, only replies in lifting her head so she can take sips of water. She can taste dust, and the scientist in her is wondering about the sour aftertaste the particles leave on her tongue.</p>
<p>„Your injuries require more expertise then I can offer“ his low voice startles her, when she thought she would slip off in silence, that the ever surrounding noice of space would be the only sounds to be her companion, when oblivion would claim her again. Because it is there, in the edge of her vision, in the mind-numbing pain in her body. She has no doubt that this is it. <br/>„..and we are two days away from the nearest inhabited planet, last time I checked.“ With effort she turns her head away as she speaks, a tear suddenly escaping her eye. <br/>Again the Mandalorian stays silent, motionless. Only the hymn of engines filling the bay. <br/>„Let me take look, see what I can do“ but he does not move apart from a tilting of his head, as if he awaits permission to touch her again. So she gives him a single nod, and while he cuts the layers off of her broken body, the mud caked skin, she thinks about that final moment up on the tree, before she did anything. Just sitting, her back against the bark of the trunk, a new world empty for her gaze. </p>
<p>Later, lost to any sense of time, the Mandalorian covers her with a blanket, soft where it touches her bare skin. He has barely spoken; not asked her a single question yet he is still at her side. He seems to have nod off, but Eslo can’t find sleep. <br/>Afraid of what will happen if she closes her eyes, looses her consciousness. And so she does the only logical thing to do:facing the unknown with open arms. She does close them, slowing her breath and letting her guards down and the senses of life and nothingness around flood her. A wave of grief catches her, swelling and ebbing, mixed with loss and love. Somewhere she knows this is a mistake, an overstepping of boundaries but she cant escape it, shut herself out of it. So she feels what the Mandalorian sees in his dreams. </p>
<p>A recurring beep wakes him up, snaps Eslo out of the forced connection. He is on his feet in seconds, rushing up the ladder after a quick glance at her, and only a moment later  she hers the low hum of an intercom in the cockpit. The bond between the two of them is not yet completely cut off, the sudden warmth of love pumps through her veins. The kind that knows no end, and does not want to know any gain, the selfless love between a parent and a child. </p>
<p>And again Eslo finds herself on the brink of tears. She doesn’t want to know that, doesn’t want to know what it must be like to be loved like that and she hates the initiation of envy. Her injuries make her irrational, broken both physically and mentally. And she wishes for the solitude of her spaceship, the cycles of not spotting a single soul, of being completely on her own and depending on no one.  </p>
<p>The steps that come closer to her sound heavy yet lightfooded. From the corner of Eslos eyes she sees the Mandalorian carrying a steaming bowl of broth towards her. Kneeling with a quiet grunt of pain on his side. And with a sudden clarity that cuts through the heavy fog that clouds her whole being, she knows what to do, what to ask in this dead ended situation.</p>
<p>„Mandalorian: have mercy and do not let me wait for my death like this. End what I can not.“ She fixes her gaze on the t-visor, hopes that he sees her determination. Eslo doesn’t know what she expects, but not the subtile change in his posture, weary rather than rigid. And with a slow and soft gesture, so very unexpected, her cares her hair out of her face, tames her curls behind her ears, and withdraws his gloved fingers again. <br/>„What is your name?“ His modulated voice is low and quiet. <br/>„Eslo“<br/>„You trust me with your death.“ Neither question nor statement.“ Can I ask you to trust me with your life Eslo?“</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Do not despare: a Mandalorian is coming to the rescue!<br/>Feedback and critism appreciated and welcomed &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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